Data compression is the compacting of data by decreasing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Thus, the compressed information will need substantially less disk space than the original one, so a lot more content could be stored using identical amount of space. You will find various compression algorithms that function in different ways and with a number of them only the redundant bits are removed, so once the data is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others erase excessive bits, but uncompressing the data later will result in lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a large amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, so every hosting platform that uses compression in real time must have ample power to support this feature. An example how information can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" what number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the actual code.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The cloud web hosting platform where your cloud hosting account is generated employs the reliable ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the latter uses is superior in various aspects, and not only does it compress data better than any compression method that a variety of other file systems use, but it's also considerably faster. The benefits are significant especially on compressible content like website files. Even though it could sound unreasonable, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed data from a hard disk drive, so the performance of each website hosted on our servers will be enhanced. The better and faster compression rates also allow us to generate multiple daily backups of the full content in each hosting account, so if you delete anything by mistake, the last back-up copy that we have won't be more than a couple of hours old. This is possible because the backups take much less space and their generation is fast enough, so as to not influence the performance of our servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

In case you host your sites in a semi-dedicated server account with our firm, you can experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that is behind our advanced cloud hosting platform. What distinguishes LZ4 from all of the other algorithms out there is that it has a higher compression ratio and it is much quicker, especially with regard to uncompressing web content. It does that even quicker than uncompressed information can be read from a hard drive, so your sites will perform faster. The higher speed comes at the expense of using lots of CPU processing time, which is not an issue for our platform as it consists of a lot of clusters working together. In combination with the improved performance, you'll have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you will be able to recover any deleted content with several clicks. The backup copies are available for an entire month and we can afford to store them since they take a lot less space compared to ordinary backups.